Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-D3H Budget FM2 Motherboard

The fan control options in the UEFI/BIOS are fairly simplistic and it's not much better on the desktop. EasyTune, Gigabyte's multipurpose tweaking and monitoring tool, offers a little more functionality but it's rudimentary at best.

EasyTune adds the option to adjust the temperature range and the minimum fan speed but the maximum fan speed is locked at 100%. It also only allows you to choose two points so changes in fan speed are completely linear.

SpeedFan screen with correlations inputted.

Once again, if you're Windows user, a better fan control experience is available in the form of SpeedFan. Properly configured, it can control all three fans, though SYS_FAN1 only works with voltage control (3-pin) and the same control is tied to the voltage of CPU_FAN. To enable the fan controls, find the "IT8728F" chip in the advanced menu and change its PWM 1-3 modes to "software controlled."

We also discovered through trial and error that the temperature Gigabyte specifies as "System" corresponds to the area around the VRMs to the left of the APU socket. This is a good location for a temperature sensor as the circuitry in that location runs quite hot and lacks cooling aside from any spill-over airflow from the CPU fan.

Boot Performance

To test boot time we optimize the BIOS menu by setting the hard drive and other delays set to minimum, taking care not to disable common functionality like USB support, POST messages, etc. and measure the time it takes to reach the Windows loading screen (we stop here because this is the point where the O/S drive speed becomes a factor).

The boot process on the F2A75M-D3H is fairly fast, hitting the Windows loading screen in about 12 seconds.

Storage Subsystem Performance

To test storage subsystems we use CrystalDiskMark (1000 MB setting with 0x00 fill test data) and a Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB solid state drive. The drive is connected to an external dock for eSATA and USB 3.0 benchmarking (limited to 3 Gbps and 5 Gbps respectively unfortunately).

SATA

As A85X chipset is only a minor update of the A75 chipset, the speed of the Gigabyte F2A75M-D3H's native AMD controller was very similar to that of the ASUS F2A85-M Pro.

USB 3.0

Strangely we saw a significant disparity in USB 3.0 performance between the two FM2 boards, with the Gigabyte model delivering a good 30~40% improvement in both sequential and random 512K reads and writes against the ASUS board with its USB 3.0 Boost feature enabled. We cannot account for this discrepancy.